Elections are supposed to offer a choice between continuity and change. Happy with the way things are going? Vote for the party in power.

Americans are not happy with the way things are going. Only 22 percent say that the country is headed in the right direction, according to April's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. That's the lowest level since President Bush's father was in office. He got fired. The current President Bush can't run again, and his vice president isn't running. Are any Bush Republicans running in 2008?

In his speech announcing his White House bid on April 25, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., never mentioned Bush's name. But his criticism of the president's record was unmistakable. "When Americans confront a catastrophe, natural or man-made, they have a right to expect basic competence from their government," McCain said in New Hampshire.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney didn't sound too complimentary, either, when he charged, "The halls of government are clogged with petty politics and stuffed with peddlers of influence." Romney is running for the GOP nomination as a Washington outsider who can bring the skills of a private-sector chief executive to government. That's the kind of campaign that Bush ran in 2000. "It is time for innovation and transformation in Washington," Romney said when he announced his candidacy.

McCain may have the biggest Bush problem, because of his support for the president's troop buildup in Iraq. Republican strategist Ed Rollins said of McCain on CNN, "He's running for a third Bush term. And this country is not going to give Bush a third term—with John McCain or anybody else." That is why McCain used his announcement remarks to try to distance himself from Bush's record. "We all know the war in Iraq has not gone well," McCain said. "We have made mistakes, and we have paid grievously for them."

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is trying to replicate not the Bush of 2000 who won a disputed election, or the Bush of 2006 who led his party to defeat, but the Bush of 2004. "I've been dealing with terrorism before people even knew about it, going back to the 1970s," Giuliani said on April 22. He even resurrected charges that the Bush campaign used against Democrats in 2004. "If one of them gets elected," Giuliani said, "we're going on the defense." Rerunning the 2004 election seems like a good idea to rank-and-file Republicans: Giuliani is the GOP front-runner.

Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment said, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." But this year, the Democrats are the candidates refusing to speak ill of one another. Asked whether there was a winner on the stage at the April 26 Democratic debate, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said, "I'm looking at a bunch of winners right here.... And whoever wishes for Hillary is making a big mistake on the Republican side."

Republican candidates, however, have been hastening to speak ill of their fellows. Like this from Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia and former chairman of the Republican National Committee: "Governor Romney's views have been moderate to liberal in the Northeast, and it's all on videotape. Now he's trying to shift to being a conservative." At a Republican dinner in Iowa last month, Gilmore took on his party's front-runners collectively, saying, "Rudy McRomney is not a conservative." Romney's response? He told the Associated Press, "Everybody in this race that I know has changed their mind on certain positions."

Wags say that after Democrats lose an election, they form a circular firing squad. Last year, Republicans lost, so it's their turn to fire on one another. Conservatives argue that Republicans lost because they veered from their conservative principles on the deficit and other issues. McCain made the deficit part of his criticism of Bush: "Government spends more money today than ever before."

Conservatives find all of the top-tier Republican candidates—Giuliani, McCain, and Romney—suspect, and they fear they are losing their hard-won influence in the Republican Party. "We're very concerned as to whether or not, as a conservative movement, we will be the driving political force in the '08 election cycle," said candidate Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas.

Bush is very unpopular. Conservatives say it's not because he's a conservative—it's because his administration has wandered away from conservative principles.

About the Author

William Schneider is the Cable News Network's senior political analyst. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly. His column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

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No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?

If the American dream has not quite shattered as the Millennial generation has come of age, it has certainly scattered. Living affordably and trying to climb higher than your parents did were once considered complementary ambitions. Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.

The dissolution of the American dream isn’t just a feeling; it is an empirical observation. In 2014, economists at Harvard and Berkeley published a landmark study examining which cities have the highest intergenerational mobility—that is, the best odds that a child born into a low-income household will move up into the middle class or beyond. Among large cities, the top of the list was crowded with rich coastal metropolises, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York City.